Deeplinks Blog posts about Free Speech

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice is getting in the digital censorship game with a new policy that would punish an offender for having a social media presence, even when someone on the outside is posting updates on their behalf.

As reported by Fusion, Texas’ new offender manual [.pdf] creates a prohibition on inmates "maintaining active social media accounts for the purposes of soliciting, updating, or engaging others, through a third party or otherwise." The rule flies in the face of free expression by penalizing offenders not only for their own use of social media, but also when their friends and family on the outside maintain their social media accounts to draw attention to prisoner issues.

With the goal of keeping tabs on sex offenders, the state of Illinois has veered way off course. Its offender registration statute requires individuals to report every nook and cranny of their online activities to law enforcement—or face jail time. Every Internet site they visit, every online retailer account they create, and every news story comment they post must be reported to police.

EFF and the ACLU of Illinois today asked the Illinois Supreme Court to strike down these onerous requirements of the state’s Sex Offender Registration Act (SORA). The rules violate free speech rights guaranteed to all people—even unpopular people—under the Constitution.

A federal district court in Pennsylvania recently issued a terrible joint decision in Fields v. City of Philadelphia and Geraci v. City of Philadelphia, holding for the first time that "observing and recording" police activities is not protected by the First Amendment unless an observer visibly challenges police conduct in that moment. The right to record police activities, under both the First and Fourth Amendments, is an increasingly vital digital rights issue. If allowed to stand, Fields would not only hamstring efforts to improve police accountability, but—given disturbing patterns across the U.S.—could also lead to unnecessary violence.

Update April 13, 2016: The U.S. Army has confirmed in writing to Chelsea Manning that the packets were withheld due to being too many pages, rather than copyright concerns.

EFF is pleased to announce that the U.S. Army has allowed Chelsea Manning to receive a packet of news articles, EFF blog posts, and a regulatory filing related to prisoner free speech rights that it had previously withheld. Manning is currently imprisoned at the U.S Disciplinary Barracks (USDB) at Ft. Leavenworth for her role in the release of military and diplomatic documents to Wikileaks.

One of the United States government's priorities in Internet policy is encapsulated by a term that's recently been making the rounds; the "free flow of information." It appears almost every time U.S. officials describe how they intend to protect the free and open Internet, especially when it comes to international law. The general idea is that bits of online data should not be discriminated against, hindered, or regulated across national boundaries. As a general principle, this sounds positive. It could be a helpful antidote against arbitrary data localization rules that threaten to break up the global Internet, or attempts by governments' to block and censor foreign websites using nationwide filters. At least, that is the claim that officials such as the U.S.